


Source Decay

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, canon-typical horror elements, gethectd, once you've got that boy in your possession it's time to get real into unethical science, thots on being a prodigy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24563515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: “It’s unattractive to set yourself up as the repository of all knowledge, Sextus.”  Harrow snaps.He snorts.“‘Set up’ nothing.”In which Palamedes Sextus really IS the repository of all knowledge. Literally.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 6
Kudos: 83





	Source Decay

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the GtN Discord's Get Hect'd week, in honor of the DR. Sex short story drop

[TRANSCRIPT:]

[ARCH_ID xxx-xxx-xx; EXCERPT FROM THE WRITINGS OF DIOMED HEXTRIA, ARCHIVED DATE ID XX-XX-XXXX]

[RECORD BEGINS]

_...the essential issue is one of source decay. While I do not, in the scope of this work, intend to belabour the point; suffice to say that thalergetic resonances, under standard psychometric analysis, conform to a predictable fragment-decay rate of [ERR: FIG REDACTED CODE XXXXX] m/z, and while these resonances are initially much stronger than their thangergetic counterparts, no known method yet exists for their storage in the long term. Thanergetic resonances, while weaker, can be held in bone; however, the feasibility of hauling a mausoleum through the void remains questionable at best. Paper, under even the most stringent conservatorial conditions, rots. Files decay. _

_ [RECORD CONTAINS HERE ILLEGIBLE TEXT; CF ARCH_ID XXX-XXX-XX] _

_ Current standards within the field of Psychometry hold that a signal-noise ratio at or exceeding [ERR: FIG REDACTED CODE XXXXX] is to be considered maximally desirable for analysis and preservation of data. Understand that the following proposal is not made lightly. _

_ [RECORD ENDS] _

* * *

“If I had any respect for you as an academic, I would retire now, and I would never have the gall to publish again,” Palamedes drawls, head lolling off the edge of his mattress at a neck-breaking angle, skin scraped tight over the knife-edge of his larynx.

“True,” Cam replies, “But any particular reason this is coming up now?” 

Palamedes snorts, gesturing expansively with the sheaf of flimsy he holds at arm’s length, rolling over onto his stomach. Considering the sheer length of arm involved, the motion is  _ extraordinarily _ expansive, encompassing the room, and the door, and the whiteboard in the corner, and Cam, walking a knife over her knuckles, and somehow, the entire orbit of the Library, and all Nine Houses. He pushes up onto his elbows. Straightens his glasses.

“Reviewer Three,” he says, “Is of the opinion that, and I quote, ‘my citation of Hect’s work is reductive at best, and ignores the extraordinary complexity inherent in Hect’s analysis’, and that, like I said, if I had any self-respect as a researcher, and any semblance of respect for you, I would retire, and I would never have the gall to try publishing again.”

Cam nods agreeably.

“Mmm,” she hums, “You are a hack.”

“Miracle I passed the first circle exams, really.”

“Truly.”

“Reviewer Three goes on to say—” Palamedes begins, and stops.

“Goes on to say that—” he tries again.

He heaves an enormous shuddering breath, dropping forward to bury his face in a pillow. When he lifts his head again, there are tears in his eyes, glinting behind his glasses, and he can barely breathe for how hard he’s trying to stifle his laughter. He fans himself with the flimsy.

“Reviewer Three goes on to say that not only do I misunderstand a paper which I helped to edit—”

“That’s a generous estimation of your contribution,” Cam remarks.

Palamedes huffs. “I’m being very soundly dressed down, and you’re missing it.”

“By all means,” she flaps her hand at him “Do go on.”

“Thank you.”

“No trouble.”

“Reviewer Three goes on to say that not only do I not understand  _ your  _ work, but that my read of  _ Sextus’s _ work is  _ particularly  _ poor, and it appears that I’m not familiar at  _ all _ with the work in question. They have—” he thumbs a tear from the corner of his eye, panting and cackling, “—several suggestions regarding how I might better engage with the work of that worthy scholar.”

Cam barks a laugh. He flaps the papers at her, gangling over the bed like a badly-stored ladder, until she takes them from his hand. His skin is dry and thin, and exactly the same texture as the lengthy review which accuses him, in no uncertain terms and a frankly absurd number of excoriating jabs at his personal character, of catastrophically misreading three papers he wrote himself, and two of her own. It’s anonymous, of course; per procedure, you submit anonymously, review anonymously, and complain to the Oversight Committee and Admin boards about publication delays anonymously until at you’re least three rounds of revisions in.

_ Still. _

“I think you should kill me,” Palamedes announces. Cam rolls her eyes at him over the stack. “I think you should kill me,” he repeats, flopping back to stare at the ceiling, “because nothing in my life will ever be funnier than this, and I’d like to go out on a high note.”

It would be very easy. He still fits comfortably inside most air ducts, even after his shoulders filled out. He fits in  _ all _ of them if he can pop his shoulder out of the joint, a true Satellite baby, rangy and attenuated, walking like he can’t quite keep himself on the ground. She could, without any real effort at all, snap him in half like a pencil. Dislocate one or two things, shove him the ventilation, and they’d never find him.

She flings the papers at him instead.

He swats at them with an indignant yelp.

“Be a waste of a good knife,” she says, and then, after a pause:

“Who  _ wrote _ this?”

Palamedes drags a hand down his face, tugging idly at the skin of his neck. He plucks a single sheet of flimsy off his chest. Holds it up to the light.

“Well,” he muses, “One way to find out.”

There is a particular gesture he makes when he does this, hand splayed out, middle two fingers pressed together, pinky bent almost all the way up, just hovering his palm over the surface of the paper, and slowly, slowly inching closer until his fingertips make the barest brush of contact, mouth screwed up at the corners in concentration. It’s not as specific an art as people imagine—impressions, more than details, and details only after years of training, of learning exactly how to parse what data there is. You’d have to be extraordinarily gifted, having practiced your whole life, to scry a stack of papers that somebody held for twenty minutes, at most, and come up with a name.

“Sexaginta!” he announces after a moment, dropping the paper. “I wasn’t aware he liked you.”

“I’m very popular, Warden.”

“Clearly. Well, I’ll miss you, when I’m dead, following my stepping down in disgrace for my lack of academic rigour.”

No bloodsweat, but his eyes are a little glassy, the way they get after scrying. He frowns.

“I did know he liked you,” he murmurs, “I  _ Knew _ it.” He shakes his head a little. Blinks. “I’m not sure I’m ever going to get used to that.”

* * *

[TRANSCRIPT:]

[ARCH_ID xxx-xxx-xx; EXCERPT FROM THE WRITINGS OF DIOMED HEXTRIA, ARCHIVED DATE ID XX-XX-XXXX]

[RECORD BEGINS]

_ I will be candid. _

_ Psychometry of this type, on this scale, has never before been attempted. What I propose may not be able to solve the issue at all, and if it does… _

_ Frankly, I have no idea what it would do to a human being. It would take an extraordinary mind to parse that much data in a way that would be even remotely usable—a genius. It would take an even stronger will to hold all of it without simply going mad. I say this in the interest of full disclosure—it remains my belief that the possibilities outweigh the risk. _

_ We stand to lose so much. _

_ We have to try. _

_ [RECORD ENDS] _

* * *

“Well, Master Sextus, as you are no doubt aware—”

“Yes. I am.”

Master Sextus is fourteen, four months into his tenure as Heir, and his voice still cracks, splintering over vowels like a wounded animal. His eyes behind his glasses are luminous, enormous. His ears are even larger, and there is a furious pimple hunched in the shell of one of them, another coming in on one side of his nose.

“I am aware,” he says, “of everything, Master Sianar. Would you like the statistics? There are…”

His face clouds. It doesn’t look right—he’s a twitchy child, almost as bad as his cavalier, who rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet behind his chair, staring at the ceiling with the kind of insouciant, bored disdain that only a teenager can manage—but he goes very, very still, head cocked to one side, mouth slightly open.

“...Five hundred and twenty-three people on this satellite, not counting twenty-six from the Second, Fifth, and Seventh here on research visas. Median age thirty-eight. Oxygen scrubbing holding at sixty-one percent of total capacity, and the engineering team contacted you this morning to remind me that that shuttle bay five needs airlock maintenance after what they very politely called ‘unanticipated turbulence’ during Senschenal Cinq’s landing yesterday. Privately, Archivist Shestero described the same event as ‘a juvenile fucking cock-up that never would’ve happened if Cinq had maintained his nav comm at any point in the past fifty years’.”

It’s not right. Shestero’s journal is encrypted, the paranoid old fuck, he shouldn’t Know that. Shouldn’t be able to; not yet, anyway—it’s been at least seventy years since a Master Warden could See through encryption so soon. He should be bleeding, he should have to decode a cipher manually, like everyone else, he should be...something. Not a fourteen-year-old child. 

He blinks, suddenly, and pushes his glasses up his nose.

“Well. That  _ was _ educational, wasn’t it. Shall we recess?” he chirps.

Behind him, his cavalier presses her lips together in an expression absolutely nothing like a smile.

The Wardens of the Sixth—median age forty-two, mixed specializations, unusually skewed toward reconstructive linguists from Collections, and botanists—file out. The room seals behind him with a faint  _ hiss _ of suction. Palamedes kicks his heels up onto the table and snorts.

“Pack of assholes. They’re only doing this because they’re angry  _ I _ passed instead of one theirs.”

“Do you Know that?” Cam inquires breezily, “Or are you just mad?”

“No, I—yes,” he says, cocking his head again. “Yes, I do Know. Sianar keeps a journal—God knows why, you’d think people would be more leery of writing things down, considering. She backed..whatsit, from Pre-Resurrection Botany, you know, with the…”

He gestures vaguely, hand spiraling around his thin little face. 

“I thought you knew everything,” Cam says, rolling her eyes.

“I do! Doesn’t mean that I  _ remember _ ,” he insists, flushing a little. The tips of his ears are pink, translucent in the light.

‘Whatsit’ is Sigrid Exada, twenty-one, curly hair they keep in a lazy half-braid, trained as a Cav for five years before their aptitude started showing and they switched tracks, still halfway decent at the rapier-and-chain. Palamedes, Cam thinks, would  _ love _ a good look at the back of Sigrid Exada. He gets all stuffy and tongue-tied whenever they’re around. He’s lying about forgetting their name. Cam can tell. Anyway, they’re an ass, like Sianar, who’s probably only keeping a journal at all because she hopes they’ll all have to study her great works when she’s dead.

“Well,” Cam murmurs, drawing up alongside him, “As I’m  _ quite _ sure you’re aware,  _ Maaaaahster _ Sextus,”

It’s more than half a yawn, plummy and round as pudding, voice shoved as low and solemn as her lungs will go.

“ _ Maaaaahster _ Hect,” Palamedes drawls back, “It is contingent on you as  _ cahvalieh _ to ensure that—”

Back and forth, more and more nasal until they both collapse snickering into the table, shoving at each other’s shoulders. Cam twitches a sheaf of papers from under his elbow, wrinkling her nose as she scans down the line items.

“What does  _ Theoretical _ Pre-Resurrection Botany even do?”

“One supposes they grow plants. Theoretically. They ask for enough fucking fertilizer, if nothing else.”

He drops his face into his arms.

“I  _ hate  _ these things,” he groans. 

Cam pats his shoulder, with all the warmth and comfort of a brick to the face.

“I think,” she says delicately, “you should divert funding from imaginary dirt, and put it towards buying me a better knife. Exada’s got two feet on me, I’ll need it.”

Palamedes squints up at her through a crack between his arms, glasses shoved halfway up his head.

“No you don’t,” he mutters witheringly.

“No, I don’t,” Cam agrees, “But I want one. I’m the Warden’s Hand now.”

The Warden’s hand gestures rudely back at her, and Cam laughs.

* * *

[TRANSCRIPT:]

[ARCH_ID xxx-xxx-xx; EXCERPT FROM THE WRITINGS OF DIOMED HEXTRIA, ARCHIVED DATE ID XX-XX-XXXX]

[RECORD BEGINS]

_ No obvious trends as of yet. As of the latest trials, we’ve been able to successfully encode portions of Archival data using thanergetic signatures, and write them into the existing energy reserves of trial candidates with a success rate of slightly less than twenty percent. Baseline necromantic aptitude doesn’t seem to factor in, at least as far as the write-in procedure is concerned, although I imagine it will be necessary, in the future, to impose and test for a minimum lower bound of necromantic ability, simply as a practical concern. Early days, still, but I had hoped for more obvious correlations among successful candidates.  _

_ But it is possible. _

_ We’re going to need to test for reasoning ability as well—this has been my belief from the outset, but as we’ve seen with [REDACTED_CF_ARCH_ID_PERM xxx-xxx-xxxxxx-xx], the amount of data we’re able to copy across is useless if the subject in question can’t access any of it. _

_ But it is possible. We know that now. _

_ [RECORD ENDS] _

* * *

  
  


They share a room, now. Formally, that is, as befits the Warden and His Hand, which saves the effort of sneaking off to each other’s rooms at all hours like they did back when they were still in the juvie dorms.

The novelty of it feels a little disingenuous, honestly. Formally, they’ve been sharing a room for five years now, but it still feels new.

He’s still too tall for the bed, and probably always will be, Cam thinks, watching him struggle with the roll of cloth tape he’s busy with, winding it around his wrists with a grim determination and almost no skill whatsoever. The Master Warden of the Library knows everything the Library knows, everything it has ever written down, and he still can’t remember which way the tape is supposed to go when he’s wrapping his hands. He tugs at a loose end with his teeth, knuckles and wrists taped up like a boxer—like Cam’s are, except that his are covered in ink and chemical burns, bracing his knobby joints against tendonitis, instead of a punch.

“You’ve done that wrong,” she remarks, chin propped on her fist.

“No,” he replies, “I haven’t.”

Cam shrugs.

“My mistake, Warden.”

“Cam.”

He squints intently at his palm.

“Camilla.” he says again.

She yawns breezily, popping her neck. 

“It’s nothing, Warden. I mistook myself. You know everything.”

“ _ Camilla.” _

He’s hunched into his desk chair, knees wedged under his chin, staring at her over his glasses with the flat disapproval of a formal Oversight Committee censure, the kind they send out on the grey forms, but stretching his hand towards her, palm up, supplicant and skinny. His knuckles are enormous. Cam bends his wrist back, lips pursed critically. Lets it drop.

“You’ve gone the wrong way around the thumb again,” she announces, “ _ Warden. _ ”

“Oh, fuck off.”

He snatches his hand back, and starts unpicking the tape.

His tendonitis isn’t  _ that _ bad. It flares, sometimes, but not enough to warrant the length of black swathing nearly his entire hand from the second phalanx of each finger all the way down past the hard knob of his wrist. 

The Master Warden knows everything the Library knows, even when he doesn’t want to, and Palamedes remembers everything he’s ever read, and using necromancy for everything makes you soft, but he is, at heart, still a psychometrist. It’s been years now since he’s touched Dulcinea’s letters except to open them. He reads them with his hands caged up by his throat, bent like a carrion bird over the perfumed flimsy she sends them on, glasses crooked on his nose, the way they are always crooked on his nose.

And then Cam takes the letters away, before anybody can Archive them, and Know about it later.

* * *

[TRANSCRIPT:]

[ARCH_ID xxx-xxx-xx; EXCERPT FROM THE WRITINGS OF DIOMED HEXTRIA, ARCHIVED DATE ID XX-XX-XXXX]

[RECORD BEGINS]

_My initial assessment was mistaken—or incomplete, rather—while baseline necromantic ability does not factor in the_ ** _initial_** _success of the write-in procedure, it does present an upper bound on the total amount of data which can be written in at all. In light of this, I’ve made several additional recommendations for testing; look over them when you can?_

_ [RECORD ENDS] _

The room isn’t cold—it can’t be, it can’t be too cold or too hot or too dry or too humid—but it feels like it  _ should _ be.

They’ve shaved his head, and taped a series of wires to his skull, for “signal monitoring”.

They mean “to see if he starts seizing”, but Palamedes lets it pass without comment, fingertips probing nervously at the newly-bare skin of his nape.

Later in life, he will keep his hair this way, a bare quarter-inch of stubble.

Now, it’s very new, and very strange, and the room is not cold, but he isn’t used to feeling the air on his scalp like this, and it tickles, and the Masters take him into a perfectly anoxic catacomb, and they’re all looking at him, and Palamedes holds his hand out over the coffin, and the lid  _ whooshes _ back, and Master Warden Seigarren grins up at him, eyeless and dead and Palamedes is thirteen, and he cannot hear the sensors going off, and he reaches out, and takes the Warden’s hand, and 

Knows.

Everything.

* * *

[TRANSCRIPT:]

[ARCH_ID xxx-xxx-xx; EXCERPT FROM THE WRITINGS OF DIOMED HEXTRIA, ARCHIVED DATE ID XX-XX-XXXX]

[RECORD BEGINS]

_ We’ve done it. _

_ [RECORD ENDS] _

* * *

“It’s unattractive to set yourself up as the repository of all knowledge, Sextus.” Harrow snaps.

He snorts.

“‘Set up’ nothing.”

**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic, or tumblr @thefaustaesthetic


End file.
